Lab in fall 2024
Lab in early 2023
Lab in spring 2021
Lab in fall 2020
Who are we?
PI
High school, undergraduate, and postgraduate trainees
Graduate students
Staff scientists and visiting scholars
PI
Rachel Perry, PhD, Associate Professor of Cellular & Molecular Physiology, Internal Medicine (Endocrinology), and Comparative Medicine
Rachel earned her Ph.D. and completed her postdoctoral training at Yale in the lab of Dr. Gerald Shulman, where she focused on the development and application of novel stable isotope tracer methods to model hepatic metabolism under physiological and pathophysiological conditions. In her own lab at Yale, Rachel studies how metabolism intersects with various physiological and pathophysiological states, including cancer and inflammation. This is, quite sincerely, her dream job.
Rachel’s CV (updated 6/20/23) can be found here.
High school, undergraduate, and postgraduate trainees
Clancy Bush (former remote postgrad trainee, now MS student)
Clancy first contacted Rachel as a postgrad interested in graduate school. He’s worked remotely with the Perry lab since, and has published a commentary, with a book chapter in press. Clancy is now a master’s student at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
Katie Liu (high school student)
Katie is a high school student in Texas, working on utilizing publicly available transcriptomics, imaging, and deidentified clinical data to generate new insights into the metabolic underpinnings of breast cancer outcomes.
Aditya Shah (high school student)
Aditya is a high school senior working in the Perry lab. He has made substantial contributions to multiple research projects including training new Perry lab members, and most notably led a project to understand how PPARg (a key regulator of lipid metabolism) affects breast cancer progression.
Kaylee Zilinger (postbaccalaureate fellow)
Kaylee is a postbac in the Perry lab and a member of the first class of the prestigious American Cancer Society Diversity in Cancer Research program at Yale. Kaylee has hit the ground running in the Perry lab, and is leading a project aiming to understand the metabolic dependence of different renal cell carcinoma cell lines, as well as participating in projects to study metabolic manipulation of immunotherapy responsiveness and the impact of exercise on outcomes in mouse models of melanoma.
Graduate students
Andin Fosam (PhD student)
Andin is an MD/PhD student completing her graduate work in Cellular & Molecular Physiology in the Perry lab. She is interested in better understanding the metabolic crosstalk that is crucial to optimizing health in physiology and pathophysiology. Andin is leading a clinical trial trying to understand how blood flow restriction exercise affects the immunometabolome following ACL reconstruction surgery, and has created a rat model of ACL reconstruction surgery in order to perform mechanistic studies in rodents.
See: Fosam & Perry Current Opinion in Nutrition and Metabolic Care 2020
Rosa Grijalva (PhD student)
Rosa is a third year Ph.D. student in the Interdepartmental Neuroscience Program, and an NSF fellow who joined the lab in Fall 2024. Her project will combine her expertise and passion for neuroscience with the Perry lab’s interest in metabolism, aiming to understand the neurobiological underpinnings of cancer-related fatigue.
Abigail Koomson (PhD student)
Abigail is a second year Ph.D. student in Cellular & Molecular Physiology, and a member of the Cancer Biology Training Program at Yale. She is interested in developing new therapeutic approaches to intervene in the quality-of-life-limiting, and sometimes treatment-limiting, phenomenon of cancer-related fatigue.
Yanitza Rodriguez (PhD student)
Yanitza is a third-year Ph.D. student at Yale who has decided to pursue her doctorate in the Perry lab, although as a former Yale postgrad, she has collaborated with our lab for 6+ years now! Yanitza’s project seeks to understand the mechanisms of metabolic dysfunction that occur in the context of obesity, with the goal to generate new lifestyle or supplement recommendations for rodents (with implications for people!) with obesity and impaired reproductive health.
Postdocs
Susana Nakandakari, PhD (initially visiting PhD student, now postdoc)
Susana is a nutritionist and joined us as a visiting PhD student from Brazil. She was mentored during her PhD by Dr. Dennys Cintra in Brazil, and co-mentored by Dr. Perry and Dr. Andrew Wang here at Yale. Now, as a postdoctoral associate, working with this multidisciplinary team, Susana is interested in how systemic metabolism affects outcomes in sepsis, and she is an expert in cecal ligation and puncture (no easy feat!).
Staff Scientists and Visiting Scholars
Wanling Zhu
Wanling is a research technician who works 20% of the time in the Perry lab. She has been a crucial participant in hundreds of our in vivo mouse studies and is a skilled surgeon: few people we know can place a catheter in a vein that’s just 0.2 mm wide with almost 100% survival rate, but Wanling can!
See: Akingbesote, Norman, Zhu, et al. Communications Biology 2022
Zhang, Halberstam, Zhu, et al. Cancer & Metabolism 2022
Li, Zhang, et al. bioRxiv 2023 FGF-21 kidney gluconeogenesis
Riko Kashima, MD
Dr. Kashima is an endocrinologist with a deep interest in regulation of systemic metabolism. She is a valued member of our lab who aims to better understand how renal glucose production promotes renal cell carcinoma progression.
Lab Alumni
Ngozi Akingbesote (PhD student)
Ngozi is a fifth year graduate student in Cellular & Molecular Physiology, completing her PhD in the Perry lab, and an HHMI-Gilliam fellow. She is expertly juggling multiple projects related to metabolic scaling, metabolic therapy for breast cancer, and how the response to immunotherapy for breast cancer may be modulated by exercise.
See: Akingbesote et al. eLife 2023
Akingbesote et al. JNCI Monograph 2023
Sita Kottilil (Yale undergraduate student)
Sita was a Yale undergraduate and now a Research Coordinator in the Division of Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. In the Perry lab, she initially worked on understanding how exercise slows tumor growth in breast cancer, with the goal of identifying new mechanisms by which we can improve the efficacy of standard breast cancer treatments. Subsequently, Sita led her own independent project to understand how hypoxia affects the metabolic dependence of muscle cells in vitro.
Ryan Liu (remote high school student, now BS/MD student at Brown)
Ryan joined the lab as a high school junior working remotely with the Perry lab. He earned the prestigious NIDDK summer student fellowship in 2022, and worked on several projects related to exercise and cancer, and utilizing a multimodal dataset to gain a deeper understanding of how tumor fatty lipid metabolism affects outcomes in breast cancer. Now a BS/MD student at Brown, to our delight Ryan kindly still collaborates with the lab on occasion as a mentor to newer trainees in the lab!
Xinyi Zhang (PhD student, 2020-2024)
Xinyi is the third Ph.D. graduate from the Perry lab in Cellular & Molecular Physiology. She rotated in the lab during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we were delighted that she has decided to stay! Her project focuses on the use of metabolic therapy in melanoma, a tumor type that has traditionally not been associated with metabolic changes but has given us some interesting hints of metabolic vulnerabilities that may be exploitable. Additionally, based on her own observations, Xinyi devised a new metabolic therapy to treat cancer-related fatigue. Xinyi is now a patent associate at K&L Gates.
See: Zhang et al. AJP-Endo 2024 TZD for melanoma
Zhang et al. AJP-Endo 2024 CRF review
Zhang et al. AJP-Endo 2023 cancer related fatigue
Zhang et al. Cancer & Metabolism 2022
Li, Zhang, et al. bioRxiv 2023 FGF-21 kidney gluconeogenesis
Gautham Ramshankar (remote high school student, 2023-2024)
Gautham was a high school student who worked remotely with the Perry lab. Initially mentored by Ryan Liu, he examined substrate preference in cancer utilizing publicly available databases. Now Gautham is a first year student at Yale!
See: Ramshankar et al. PLoS One 2023
Ramshankar and Perry Diabetes 2024 (commentary)
Ngan (CeCe) Vu (remote researcher, 2023-2024)
CeCe worked in the Perry lab as a remote researcher during part of her med school in Ireland. During her brief time in the lab, her work included publication of a commentary:
See Vu and Perry, Clin. Transl. Discovery 2024
Isaac Kaba (remote undergraduate student, 2023)
Isaac worked with the Perry lab as a senior at the University of Toledo, Ohio, pursuing a BS in Pharmaceutical Sciences with a major in Medicinal and Biological Chemistry. His research interests include cancer biology, targeted therapies, and drug discovery, and in the Perry lab he performed multi-Omics analysis of publicly available data, aiming to develop new targets for cancer. Isaac is now a PhD candidate in Chemistry at UC Berkeley.
Kadidja Morou (summer Pathways to Science high school student, 2023)
Kadidja is a rising 11th grad student at West Haven High School with an interest in becoming a doctor. She is currently doing a summer internship in the Perry lab, working with mice to try to understand how exercise improves the response to immunotherapy in triple negative breast cancer, the deadliest form of the disease.
Vijayavalli Thangaraj Panneerselvam, BDS (Community Research Fellow, 2023)
Dr. Thangaraj Panneerselvam is a dentist and a master’s student at the University of New Haven. She joined our lab through the Community Research Fellows program and worked on projects related to systemic metabolism and cancer.
Azia Bunn (Community Research Fellow, 2023)
Azia Bunn was a member of the Perry lab through the Yale Cancer Center’s Community Research Fellows program. She is interested in science communication, and she will be helping us improve our manuscripts so as to explain our science to the community more effectively!
See: Li, Zhang, Zhu, Zhang, Sadak, Halberstam, Brown, CJ Perry, Bunn, et al. bioRxiv 2023
Stephan Siebel, MD, PhD (Associate Research Scientist, 2019-2022)
Dr. Siebel has considerable experience (and doctorates) in flux methodology and genetics. In the Perry lab, he worked to understand how alterations in various metabolic pathways promote cancer pathogenesis. In addition, he was our local mass spec expert – a skill which cannot be undervalued! – and developed all of the LC/MS methodologies we use for internal studies and collaborations in the area of central carbon, fatty acid, and amino acid metabolism. He is currently the Technical Director of the Yale University IOMIC Mass Spectrometry Core Facility.
See: Li, Zhang, Zhu, Xu, Yu, Zhao, Siebel, et al. bioRxiv 2023
Zongyu Li, PhD (graduate student, 2019-23)
Zongyu was a PhD student in Cellular & Molecular Physiology. Before the end of his research rotation, he was already producing publishable-quality FACS data (!), and he did not slow down from there. Zongyu’s two projects included delving into how a novel inflammatory mediator may improve hypoglycemia counterregulation, and understanding a metabolic pathway that may drive renal cell carcinoma using REGAL (REnal Gluconeogenesis Analytical Leads). He is now a postdoc fellow with an American Cancer Society postdoctoral fellowship in Dr. Marcia Haigis’ lab!
See: Nasiri, Rodrigues, Li, et al. Cancer & Metabolism 2019
Dennis Owusu (remote postgraduate student, 2022-23)
Dennis is a recent graduate of Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Ghana, who worked remotely as a member of the Perry lab. His work involves image and RNAseq analysis in liver and tumor, aiming to identify metabolic programs important in both homeostasis and pathophysiology. Dennis is currently a PhD student at Duke University.
See: Akingbesote, Leitner, Jovin, Desrouleaux, Owusu, et al. eLife 2023
Brooks Leitner, PhD (graduate student, 2020-22)
Dr. Leitner is an MD/PhD student whose credentials include serving as a personal trainer to humans and – in the lab – to mice. His projects focused on how systemic metabolism affects the response to cancer and sepsis. Dr. Leitner’s first (of many) first-author paper in the lab is based on work completed during his five-week rotation, and it was far from his last!
See: Nasiri AR, Rodrigues MR, Li Z, Leitner BP, Perry RJ Cancer & Metabolism 2019
Leitner & Perry JNCI Cancer Spectrum 2020
Leitner et al. NPJ Precision Oncology 2022
Leitner et al. Biochem. J. 2022
Schaubroeck, Leitner, & Perry. Physiological Reports 2022
Zhang, Halberstam, Zhu, Leitner, et al. Cancer & Metabolism 2022
Briana Robles (summer student, 2022)
Briana joined us for the summer of 2022 as a BioMed Amgen Scholar. She is a student at the University of Florida interested in pursuing an MD/PhD, and worked with us on projects related to metabolism and cancer, mentored by Xinyi. She is now a postbac at Columbia University.
Alexandra Halberstam (undergraduate student, 2021-22)
Alex was a Yale Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology and History of Science, History of Medicine double major, completing her senior thesis in the Perry lab. Her work, with Xinyi Zhang, sought to understand how in vitro and in vivo tumor metabolism can be modulated to improve outcomes in melanoma. She is currently a fellow at the Max Planck Institute of Psychiatry in Germany, having been awarded the Alexander von Humboldt German Chancellor Fellowship to perform research investigating epigenetic changes associated with intergenerational trauma.
See: Zhang, Halberstam, et al. Cancer & Metabolism 2022
Li, Zhang, Zhu, Zhang, Sadak, Halberstam, et al. bioRxiv 2023
Kyle Schaubroeck (summer student, 2021)
Kyle is currently a PhD student at the University of Wisconsin. He joined the Perry lab through the Yale BioMed Amgen Scholars program, and worked hard to develop an optimized method for tissue glycogen quantification – all over a 7-week summer internship!
Aray Beisenbayeva (remote high school student, 2020-21)
Aray worked with us as a high school student in Kazakhstan. She joined Shyryn Ospanova to perform a data analysis project to better understand the social and biochemical determinants of prognosis in lung cancer. Aray is now an undergraduate student at Notre Dame University.
See: Leitner, Givechian, Ospanova, Beisenbayeva, et al. NPJ Precision Oncology 2022
Shyryn Ospanova (remote high school student, 2020-21)
Shyryn worked with us remotely, as a high school student in Kazakhstan and in partnership with Aray Beisbenbayeva, on a data analysis project to better understand the social and biochemical determinants of prognosis in lung cancer. She is currently an undergraduate at the University of Pennsylvania.
See: Leitner, Givechian, Ospanova, et al. NPJ Precision Oncology 2022
Hailey Edelman (undergraduate student, 2020-21)
Hailey is an undergraduate student at Yale. Her project in the Perry lab, in part working with Brooks Leitner, involved exploring the mechanisms that modulate exercise performance and recovery in rodents, and exploring potential therapies to enhance these processes.
Chigoziri Konkwo (MD student, 2020-21)
Chigoziri is a fifth year medical student at Yale. He worked on several projects in the Perry lab, writing a review, comprehensively investigating the whole-body transcriptional response to exercise, as well as performing hands-on work in mice, exploring how systemic metabolism affects outcomes in murine models of lung cancer.
Aaron Norman (visiting medical student, 2020)
Aaron is a medical student in Germany. He visited our laboratory in the fall of 2020, working with Ngozi Akingbesote on studies examining breast tumor metabolism and the impact of exercise in slowing tumor growth.
See: Akingbesote, Norman, Zhu, Halberstam, Zhang, et al. Communications Biology 2022
Perry Lab 